I’ll Drown My Book reviewed at Jacket2

While this isn’t your instructional handbook of Conceptualism and/or your poetics seminar syllabus, the absent center isn’t just a whirligig; it’s an absent lyric subject, who, in many of these pieces, seems eerily to reappear. Vanessa Place, in her afterword, writes, “do I consider all the work within this anthology to be conceptual writing? Yes and, more naturally, no.” Here perhaps she gives us an answer as to the question of how to read this volume, and the answer is neither, or, whichever. The one whose job it is to make sense, according to Place, is the reader, “who is the thinker who is the village explainer, given that this one is also the village.”